First On RPS: Eight Minutes Of Insurgency 2

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When Insurgency was first released in 2007, even RPS wasn’t around. A total conversion mod for Half-Life 2, it was co-created by Jeremy Blum, the man behind that even more famous mod, Red Orchestra. And now, five years on, his independent studio – New World Interactive – is creating a sequel, Insurgency 2. There’s some in-game footage in the game’s Kickstarter video, but tonight we can exclusively show you eight minutes of the game in action. It’s below.

The game, like the original, is focusing heavily on tactical shooting, in the endless battle between Insurgents and Marines. It’s a tough world, and only a few bullets means death. To get anywhere you’ll have to work as a team, they say. In the footage below you’ll see the high-speed nature of the game, in a bunch of different maps.

Proving you can never predict Kickstarter, the project to make a sequel to one of the most popular mods hasn’t caught on fire straight away. They wisely picked a very long run, so despite a few weeks only getting them a fifth of the way there, there’s still a month for people to notice.

The game is aiming to be out by January next year, but obviously a lot rests on the success of the Kickstarting.

I think they’ve fallen into the trap here, insurgency ‘ip’ aside, releasing a bland looking modern-warfare-in-a-sandy-place-with-arab-badguys game, post all the actual modern warfare and battlefield nonsense is a bit of commercial suicide.

Yea bro this mod came out before FPS’s were being spammed left and right. This game was awesome back in HL1 (other than the LAW spammers). So no, not look another FPS – all half life mods that succeed have thoroughly earned their right to be there and you don’t have to like it.

Also no we wouldn’t like CS again when or if we gave it another go. Counter-Strike stopped being good around beta 8. That was over 12 years ago. Global Offensive is just the same game that real developers made on their spare time, which Valve bought from them and ruined, and then repackaged repeatedly to sell to us.

I just think no one wants an FPS on kickstarter. I certainly wouldn’t back an FPS. The big developers already do this. Maybe not as realistic as some would like, but even those few are probably sick on FPS games or at least not interested enough to go back yet another one.

Kickstarter to me is a place where indie developers go with their projects\game designs that aren’t already being catered for by the big companies.

Why would being an FPS disqualify it from the kickstarter crowd? Sure, they prefer experimental stuff, but niche is still VERY liked on it, and insurgency is quite the multiplayer fps sim that maybe only arma can come close to.

I just think it’s an uphill struggle trying to get people to back an FPS..look at the first comment on this article…says it all..and thats the problem. They will really have to think hard on new features and bring in alot of features that people have been asking for in FPS games…

Personally it will have to be pretty amazing for me to sit up and take notice and get past the …oh another fps apathy..

The FPS that NEEDS to be backed by kickstarter is Firearms mod. Firearms was hands down the best multiplayer modern-tac shooter HL mod there ever was. The weapon customization was king, the class interaction between medics and support and junk predated Battlefield’s arcade bullshit by years (I refer to BF3 with medic rezzes, as opposed to Firearms where you had to suture and splint legs and junk). It was much better than Ins (which was still awesome.)

Because people think CoD when they think FPS these days, and the video looking like a cheap version of Call of Duty. People look to Kickstarter for things that won’t get made without their assistance, not stuff that will.

(Whether it is a cheap version of CoD or not is besides the point; that’s what it LOOKS like.)

Cheap version of COD… lol Not even close. This is the kind of shooter that brings back nostalgia of late 90’s tactical shooters. Which is exactly what Kickstarter is for. Remaking old types of games that people remember fondly but are too niche for a major publisher to want to back them.

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I have to agree, unless they showcase something particularly ground breaking it’s your standard brown and grey man-shoot. There are so many interesting projects competing for those resources it would have to be a truly spectacular FPS. All that footage evoked was apathy.

I agree. It was a very enjoyable game and quite good for being a mod. While I love what Kickstarter is doing, I haven’t actually had a lot of money to put into projects. Seeing some of the luke-warm reactions to the game makes me want to support it more, as I know how fun the mod was.

I gave up on the CoD series after MW1 because of the awful inclusions of things that were just terrible in terms of gameplay. AI controlled choppers, Martyrdom perk, extra grenade perk; all these things stuck out even more on the smaller maps making them practically unplayable. I feel like there is a distinct difference between what a game like this is doing and what CoD is doing. While it might not be clear by simply watching a trailer, people who have been playing FPS games long enough to recognize the subtle differences in gameplay and core mechanics will appreciate what these guys are doing. People talk shit about FPS games like they are inherently bad or boring. No, we just need games that have attention to detail and devs that understand how important game balance and mechanics are, especially in a genre that has been around for so long. I for one am going to try to find some extra dollars to back these guys. Good luck to them and thanks for posting about this RPS!

It was a great mod and great production values. The reason I stopped after a few months was that it was way too buggy and the devs started fighting and the game feel into disrepair very quickly. I hope this time around they can just focus on making it a smooth experience.

There is a lot of old kit tossing around the middle east that insurgents get their hands on.

I remember watching a interview a while back where they talked to a guy who ran an armory on one of the U.S. bases in Iraq. He was in charge of going through all of the weapons that troops found stashed in places.

Saying MP40 is used in the middle east is just plain bull****. It might be fun to see it in a game, but has nothing to do with insurgents. If it’s reality they are after, then it was just a bad game design decision.

I don’t see why it would be absurd to see old weapons from WW2 showing up. It most definitely isn’t unusual to see footage of U.S. troops with messing around with captured PPSHs and there are Lee-Enfields around from the turn of the century. Hell they even make their own see Khyber Pass Copies.

also I found it/ link to youtube.com not actually a documentary, but a short interview with some folks. Skip to the 35 second mark

Wasn’t one of the original gimmicks of Insurgency that there were no kill notifications and no kill cams? That was probably my favorite aspect. It completely changed the pace of the game and made it unique. This… looks a lot like CS:GO.

Almost. Kill messages were heavily delayed, just as they appear in that trailer there (the knife kill doesn’t even appear in the whole time that sequence is shown). I remember it was a server variable that could be changed or disabled altogether.

Have alot of fond memories of ins, it was the height of team play and strategy, with things like suppressive fire, bullet drop, limited but effective grenades (you didn’t rush into anything at the start!), etc.

Can’t help but get behind these guys and help spread the word too. Great to see RPS spreading the good news too. Am a little anxious for their kickstarter though!

Or just have good trigger control so you don’t need the extra modes. But you’re still set to full auto for unexpected close-up emergencies when you need it.

I seem to recall some rifle trainers saying that fire modes were just a crutch for those who can’t maintain good trigger control in a firefight.

Of course, some early FPS games weren’t very good at modelling recoil and inaccuracy, so setting a tighter mode (semi or burst) was modelled by upping the per-shot accuracy, even on the first shot. This meant that if you wanted to perform a precise shot, you had to switch to semi mode, rather than just tapping the trigger in auto mode. I would hope that modern games are above this sort of silliness, though.

I think the reason I would be willing to back Insurgency 2 on Kickstarter, even though it’s an FPS, would be if I can expect heavily tweakable dedicated servers with mods/plugins, and/or some built-in community-oriented features (namely reserved slots and a robust admin system).

Brink came up with too little, too late; BF3 was a pretty big failure in that department; Arma 2 is just too intense to draw a big crowd in my neck of the Internet; Tribes Ascend is fun, but they don’t seem like they’re going to offer enough agency to really RUN dedicated servers the way we want to…
Insurgency, being a source mod, was awesome, and would’ve stuck around a lot longer if it hadn’t been so buggy for so long.

But really, I’m just looking for something other than TF2. Time to go do some research to find out if Ins2 will get my money!

One of the things I liked about Insurgency was that it had TrackIR support. Unfortunately, it seemed to me that their implementation made 3D scopes just about useless since the crosshairs wouldn’t quite move with my head which meant my shots were always just a little bit off from where I was aiming.

Can’t watch this video because its in mobile-unfriendly flash, first video features way too much of a man with way too little charisma, and it looks like a far less pretty version of a hundred other multiplayer FPS. Not really surprised the kickstarter is struggling, whatever the actual merits of the game.

Player movement seems WAY too fast. I don’t want every game to be like ArmA II but if you check out any part where the player runs up stairs, for instance, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was Quake with more realistic guns.

It may have been popular, but there’s absolutely nothing unique about Insurgency.

There have been many better, more fun, and way more creative total-conversion multiplayer HL2 mods, such as Dystopia, Eternal Silence, or Empires, that will probably never even get the chance at Kickstarter. Even among mods, gritty-realistic Modern Military or WW2 settings get stupifyingly popular among both players and developers simply because they are gritty-realistic.

Everyone that is downplaying Insurgency as just another FPS are completely uneducated on the original Insurgency mod for HL2. The mod was outright amazing.

It’s not an arcade shooter like COD or BF3. The pace is slowed and more methodical. It’s caught inbetween COD and ArmA. It’s not really a sim but it’s not too arcadey either. Play the original mod if you don’t think this game doesn’t deserve to get backed.

“ADVANCED OUTFITTING
Our new class and weapon cache systems no longer restrict loadouts to people like in the original game. Your options for classes are light, standard and heavy – whichever one you choose determines your speed, armor and ammo capacity. This is all independent of which weapon you want to use.”

So it is using Brink’s class system… that worked out well. 90% of players will take the fastest class with the most well rounded killing capability.

“WEAPON CACHES
Players instantly respawn by their team’s weapon cache. Weapon caches are the new way of arming yourself. Every time you respawn you may choose a different weapon, depending on how you feel. Players can upgrade their weapons by performing objectives, and when they do so it actually upgrades that weapon for everyone on their team. ”

So.. .Brink’s weapon system too. Piles of weapons no one will use since they can all pick the most effective class for KDR.

You may have noticed a lack of free look in the game. another selling point of the original mod that prevented run and gun.

Plus, if you played the original mod you saw the developers have waaaaaaaaaaaaaay bigger dreams than anything they could achieve and then they failed to deliver on what little they actually created.

“So it is using Brink’s class system… that worked out well. 90% of players will take the fastest class with the most well rounded killing capability.” …
“So.. .Brink’s weapon system too. Piles of weapons no one will use since they can all pick the most effective class for KDR.”

I don’t know how well this system will work out, but in the original mod (on the Marines that is) there were a couple of slots which had a really good weapon (M4) and most other players got a crap weapon (m16). Less so on Insurgents but the Ak-74 was clearly superior to the 47, and again only a few slots got it. Even if everyone gravitates towards a particular loadout it would be an improvement over that. Anyway, the gameplay in INS is such that it’s more about reactions/awareness/placement – given how few bullets it takes to kill – than it is about kit.

“You may have noticed a lack of free look in the game. another selling point of the original mod that prevented run and gun.”

What? I don’t recall freelook of any sort.

To the extent that run’n’gun was prevented it was because you die really quick. (In fact you could move fast in some situations, but only with good timing, awareness and reactions.)

I havent played in years, but when it first came out there was a very big “freelook” area. Run-n-gun was difficult, almost aggrivating as you could be right next to the guy and still miss. But that may have been more of a bug. I dont know how it is with the current state of the game.

Wasn’t a bug. The original game was designed to play like a modern guns take on Red Orchestra. Bullets even came out of the guns instead of a player’s forehead. Trouble is that led to lots of glitching and they didn’t have the programmers to fix it. Eventually all they ever produced were a few new maps and a couple tweaks to the basic mod in gui and a doofy morale system.

The mod never really got much better than its first release. It just swapped some bugs for others as time went by and then watered down its teamplay. I still think forcing people into roles was one of its biggest draws. This design just looks like they forgot what they were doing early on and are making COD hardcore mode with no perks. That has some appeal, but it is a far cry from what the mod originally brought in its first release.

While I did play the mod quite a bit, I totally agree on the last bit you said.

They seem to have moved further away from tactical shooter and more into mainstream action! Or that’s how the trailer makes it seem anyway. I can’t say it helped incentivice me funding it – more on the contrary. :/

oh yes please
i played the mod a lot, i still play it sometimes but i suppose my heydays are over …
i really like it’s special balance of gaminess and realism – it’s a lot more fun-oriented than arma but it keeps some of the seriousness, so there is a lot of tension when you get shot at or see a nade drop nearby … makes my heart pound only thinking about it
i’d rather see a final ins upgraded to 2 then the old beta though – i didn’t even see leaning in this video
is it only me or does it look like source? they’ve also mentioned valve on the kickstarter page … i wonder

Junk. Junk sound, junk animations, massive first person weapon models. A step backwards from Insurgency 1 in every way, which itself was a step backwards from the beta and original concept. Downhill train choo choo!

Disappointingly uninformed reaction from many RPS commentators today. “Oh another FPS” reveals you really haven’t played Insurgency. And that you’re pretty desperate to prove just how unique and special your tastes are.

That’s not what we’re about is it guys? C’mon. We [i] liked [/i] counter-strike and would do again if we gave it another go. And not ironically. Christ.

However I do agree, Insurgency 2 doesn’t seem like a huge step forward on the ‘Softly…softly….SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT SHIT RUN….are they dead? You go first. Shit!” gameplay of the mod. And I also agree I would love to see Dystopia taken further forward or Eternal Silence…But those criticisms are at least informed.

And all my previous interest just evaporated. Take away the title and I’d think I was watching just another trailer for Call of Battlefield.

Gun models taking up 1/3 of the screen? Check.
Spray-and-pray working so well who needs to aim? Check.
Desert/middle eastern city setting? Check.
Total lack of anything interesting at all? Game and match.

I loved the original Insurgency I even ran a server for it. When you had a good team together it was an experience unlike any other, everyone working together, using smoke to cover your advance setting up kill squads. Some great great times on this and then the mod started to die slowly.

I’m not too excited by this though, the trailer makes the game look awful it’s lost all its charm from the mod and just looks like a generic shooter. Shame.

Am I the only one thinking change of scenery would be nice? With current day stuff you have the TIER ONE OPERATOR tired look and you need to remove most optical sights that are used commonly now as a balance measure.
In fact you need to do so much to ballance it the link to real life events is weak.

I think there were other insurgency wars that would be better material. It’s not like there is no insurgency and terrorists outside of Middle East.